A jar of bicoloured pieces, a stack of sticky labels and a colour printer, and you can reproduce (or invent) any variant chess game you like. Featured are: Courier Chess, Chinese Chess, Take the Brain and Mad Mate (aka one-board exchange chess).

The great populariser of 4-way chess was Captain Verney, who insisted that the Queens should all start on light squares. But Pritchard tells me that the Hughes-Hughes version, with Queens always to the left of the King, superceded it.

Inspired by the various efforts made to explain Japanese Chess (Shogi) by marking the pieces, I had a go at making a chess set along similar lines. Needs testing on a youngster, but I'm quite pleased with it.

This is the game most often known these days from van Leyden's painting (http://www.chessvariants.org/historic.dir/courier/painting.html); there are both the old-style elephantine Bishops that hop two squares diagonally (like the al-fil in shatranj), and a modern Bishop called a Courier (Läufer, still the German name for a Bishop). The Queen is the old-school short-stepping ferz, and there are two extra pieces: a Mann (henchman), who moves like a King and is one of the most powerful pieces on the board (being able to mate with support), and a Schleich (sneak), who moves like a wazir, one square along a rank or file. The game was famously played for centuries in Ströbeck, but eventually died out there.

There were four obligatory moves to be made at the start: to advance the Rook's pawns and Queen's Pawn two squares each, then make a 'joy-leap' (Freudensprung) of the Queen forward two squares (not a move allowed on any other turn). I'd like to see Nunn's Courier Chess Openings!

The most famous set of all? I have two versions, the larger is quite authentic but whoever designed the smaller decided that the pawns were two boring and substituted a piece based on the 'berserker' shield-biting Rook, and used for the Rooks a tower based on York Minster. Chacun a son gout.

Chess Quotes

"What distinguishes a Grandmaster from a master? Chess-lovers often ask questions like that. To many people it seems that Grandmasters simply calculate variations a little deeper. Or that they know their opening theory slightly better. But in fact the real difference is something else. You can pick out two essential qualities in which those with higher titles are superior to others: the ability to sense the critical moment in a game, and a finer understanding of various positional problems."